Tuesday, December 21, 2010

World Game Report

[...] One could call this the ’Talibanization’ stage of postmodern - "Flat World" - theory where scales, times, and places have been declared largely irrelevant. What counts is the celebrity momentum and the intensive accumulation of media attention. Wikileaks manages to capture that attention by way of spectacular information hacks where other parties, especially civil society groups and human rights organizations, are desperately struggling to get their message across. Whereas the latter tend to play by the rules and seek legitimacy from dominant institutions, Wikileaks¹ strategy is a populist one that taps into widespread public disaffection with mainstream politics. Political legitimacy, for Wikileaks, is no longer something graciously bestowed upon minor actors by the powers that be. Wikileaks bypasses this old world structure of power and instead goes to the source of political legitimacy in the info-society today: the rapturous banality of the spectacle. Wikileaks genially puts to use the ’escape velocity’ of IT - using IT to leave IT behind and rudely irrupt the realm of real-world politics.